ïñtérkûltúråłna ìsträživanjá

UDC 72:7
7.01

Sonja Jankov
Independent curator
Novi Sad, Serbia

Full-Scale Architectural Models

in Post-Yugoslav Art Practices
ABSTRACT: The paper focuses on chosen works by contemporary, post-Yugoslav artists Branislav
Nikolić, Marko Lulić and Saša Tkačenko, all of which contain full-scale architectural models. In or-
der to define whether these objects are architectural doppelgangers, simulations, replicas, ready-
mades, appropriations or products of an event, the paper gives insight into histories and original
discourses of the buildings that were included into these artworks. For that purpose, the paper also
turns to Rachel Whiteread and Simon Fujiwara who created similar works within different cultural
context. The theoretic framework includes Henri Lefebvre’s trialectics of space, Theodor Adorno’s
theory of art and mimesis, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the mirrored image and notions
about the full-scale architectural models by Rem Koolhaas, Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen.
Apart from analysing the meanings of chosen works, the paper gives closer look to a specific occur-
rence in contemporary art practices – the full-scale architectural model.
KEYWORDS: full-scale model, architecture, contemporary art practices, post-Yugoslav

In 1912, young Mies van der Rohe created a full-scale wood-and-canvas model of Kröller House in Was-
senaar, Netherlands. It was apparently one in string of twenty houses designed by various architects over the
years before the owner decided for the final solution that was not Mies’. However, the model made a great
influence on Mies’ later work, which made Rem Koolhaas wonder “were its whiteness and weightlessness an
overwhelming revelation of everything he did not yet believe in? An epiphany of anti-matter? Was this canvas
cathedral an acute flash-forward to another architecture? […] Did the canvas house lead to the curtain wall?”
(1993: 63). Koolhaas suggested that the house that Mies did not make, was the house that made Mies and his
tectonics of disappearance, dissolution and floating.1 As it turned out later, this reality that had not taken place
was not only a phantom house, but also a phantom model, since, according to Philip Johnson, who produced
catalogue for the first MoMA Mies exhibition in 1947, it was fabricated, fake and never designed by Mies.

1 It could be said that a ‘house which built Le Corbusier’ was constructed at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture when Rem
Koolhaas was the curator of the Biennale’s theme Foundations. In 1914, Le Corbusier had begun to develop Dom-ino House – an open
floor system which was to enable mass production of housing after the First World War. Although he never constructed it, leaving the
concept at drawings, it made a great influence on him, as “a structure without loadbearing walls allowing for the free placement of
internal/ external walls, facilitating Le Corbusier’s planning ideology of plan libre” (Brejzek and Wallen, 2014: 99). It was made for the
first time in 2014, in front of the Biennale’s central pavilion, by architect Valentin Bontjes van Beek and students from the Architectural
Association in London. The difference between the original Le Corbusier’s concept and this 1:1 model is that the concrete was replaced
by engineered wood (timber), which allowed the construction to be shipped and exhibited at different places.

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Nevertheless, the story about Mies’ model of the Kröller House points out function and signifi-
cance of a full-scale model in architecture. It is a structure which is from the start convicted on a very
short life that may have never get duplicated in a real building. It often differs from a prototype which
is a uniquely made product with all functions, while an architectural model usually embodies only
spatial characteristics of an imagined building. The goal of this paper is to analyse what happens when
contemporary artists include full-scale models in their practices and move them into new discourse –
whether these objects are architectural doppelgangers, simulations, replicas that make one building ex-
ist in more than one place,2 ready-mades, appropriations, or something in between. According to Thea
Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen, “relationship between the model and its realised sibling is a performative
one, one that creates an event” (2014: 98). In case of (once) existing buildings, it is also important to
analyse why artists chose to make the full-scale model of one specific building and not any other. For
this reason, the paper will focus both on the works of artists and the buildings they chose.
The first part of the paper gives theoretic framework and a couple of examples from the British art
practices which included full-scale models in 1993 and 2017. The second and the third part of the paper are
historic and interpretational research, containing four case studies of works from the post-Yugoslav region,
three of which are from Serbia. The third part also turns to the work of Vladimir Bojić who created a full-
scale model of a car, instead of a building, but he did so in order to criticise the same social reality as those
artists who turn to architecture. The closing chapter compares the theory to analysed cases, positioning the
role of full-scale architectural models in contemporary art practices of the post-Yugoslav region.

FULL-SCALE MODELS AND AN EMPTY SPACE

In 1993, Rachel Whiteread created the sculpture House by filling an existing house in London with
concrete and removing later the original walls and windows. The sculpture was a concrete cast of the
basement, ground floor and the first floor of a chosen Victorian terrace house, excluding the roof space.
The process started with finding a house which had been already scheduled for demolition, change of
ownership, construction of new foundations which would support all the concrete and the process of
casting which alone took two months. The sculpture was demolished 11 weeks after its opening, be-
coming in the meanwhile a tourist attraction and subject of diverse critical response, one of which was
a petition to turn it into permanent monument, signed by 3,300 people. The work brought Whiteread
both the Turner Prize for the best young British artist and the K Foundation art award for the worst
British artist. Produced as a sculpture/ monument, Whiteread’s model became a trace which made the
real object twice demolished, both as a home and as a work of contemporary art. Her work was a death
mask of the building which lost its function, since it was destined for execution in order to make more
space for larger and more profitable premises.
In 2017, Simon Fujiwara created the House of Hope, a full-sized copy of an Amsterdam house in
whose hidden rooms lived Anne Frank. The artwork was based on the 3D model available in the house’s
gift shop and it intersected four storeys of the Dvir Gallery in Israel.3 It was cut in half, so that both in-
terior and exterior of the house were visible. Fujiwara deliberately added modern elements, since some
of such details were already in the house, like wallpaper that was made in the communist GDR and put

2 Replicas in architecture are contemporary global trend connected to spectacularization of architecture. Entire cities, such as Las
Vegas, are made largely of copies of famous touristic attractions from all around the world. These copies are given different functions in
the new settings.
3 Unlike Fujiwara who reproduces entire house, spreding it over storeys of the gallery, Simon Starling reproduces only the fifth storey
of seven-storeys high Casa Scaccabarozzi (La Fetta di Polenta) in Turin, a specific building constructed by architect Alessandro An-
tonelli from 1840 to 1881. Starling places the 1:1 scale model (2.5 x 3.7 x 10.4m) in 2007 as part of his his exhibition Three Birds, Seven
Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations.

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up after Anne’s death. He found this very interesting for such a clearly ideological house, discovering
that both “interiors and atmosphere were not ‘authentic’ but were largely staged only […] to speak of
a human truth: the nature of our pragmatism. That felt more authentic than a pure narrative of hope”
(Fujiwara, 2017).
Fujiwara made the house exist at two places at once. Its altered copy was intersecting another
building, being both exhibited and hidden within it, as Anne’s rooms. The space which was once per-
sonal and unknown to others became firstly revealed to wider public when turned into the museum
and later duplicated at different location. Added home appliances that are used nowadays make it even
more relatable to today’s viewers.
Both these works turn to buildings which had their own history4 through mimesis. According to
Theodor Adorno, art establishes a critical relation with social reality precisely through mimesis. What
is created in art points towards things which are not contained by it, since art “exists only in relation to
its other; it is the process that transpires with its other” (Adorno, 1997: 3). In other words, “works of art
yield a kind of knowledge of reality. This knowledge is critical because the mimetical moment is capa-
ble of highlighting aspects of reality that were not perceivable before” (Heynen, 1999: 186). Whiteread
and Fujiwara used mimesis to go beyond simple copies of the houses. The architectural doppelgangers
they created are not ready-mades, nor acts of appropriation, since both artists created objects to point
towards the original buildings and the meanings that they carry.
Whiteread’s House is a representative of the lost home which was there before the house disappeared.
In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory the little object a (objet petit a) is a reminder of a lost object,
whose absence leaves an empty space filled with a representative (le représentant) that urges the subject
to reunite with the desired object (Lacan, 1988b: 217). This representative would have been a paradoxical
asemantic signifier without the signified (représenter l’irreprésentable) if it were not driving the subject
to act and express himself/ herself in relation to the lost object. For Jacques Derrida, the representative
which embodies the absence is a trace left by the lost object (Derrida, 2002, 259), which in this case can be
the full-scale model of a building. Either as representative or trace, the full-scale model is the object that
embodies otherness and points directly to the lost object. Artists from the region of former Yugoslavia
have chosen to (re)create buildings which are connected to the loss of specific social reality. Their works
are critique, based on mimesis, of the empty space which is left behind that lost reality. Their works speak
of Henri Lefebvre’s trialectics of space and relation between physical, mental and social space, i.e. the rela-
tion between perceived, conceived and lived space (l’espace perçu – l’espace conçu – l’espace vécu), where
space has an “active – the operational or instrumental – role, as knowledge and action” (Lefebvre, 1991:
11). Like Whiteread and Fujiwara, post-Yugoslav artists create the models in open public spaces or within
galleries, in order to confront viewers to otherwise less visible aspects of social reality.

MODELS BETWEEN PROTOTYPES AND CONTEMPORARY ART

On the occasion of the 40th October Salon in Belgrade in 2002, Branislav Nikolić created a 1:1
replica of a typical Belgrade kiosk, using prefabricated wooden boards.5 As such, the created object

4 In contrast to that, American artist Alex Schweder creates new interactive building structures, describing his practice as Perfor-
mance architecture.
5 Association Apsolutno had also approached the urban form of a kiosk, but through intervention within interior of one kiosk in Novi
Sad which was out of function. In 1995, during the sanctions, media blockade and war on the territory of former Yugoslavia, Apsolutno
built a brick wall behind the glass panes of a kiosk at the Fish market and titled the work News(papers). The wall was the only visible
thing behind the glass panes, in whose centre was the sign “Novine” [News(papers)] which they had placed there. Apart from relating
the wall to the media blockade, the collective notes how “this form of ‘remodelling’ was a common technique used to avoid paying
building permits and taxes” (Apsolutno, 2006: 48). As such, Apsolutno’s kiosk was also an allegory of building strategies which start
from temporary, movable objects in public space and end as permanent solid structures in private ownership.

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did not have windows or doors, and it differed in materials from a regular kiosk. Placed in the central
pedestrian zone in Belgrade, the object replicated the form and the context of a regular kiosk, but it was
a full shape that could not contain anything and thus could not function as a kiosk. Being between a
sculpture and the real object, Nikolić’s Kiosk appears as an archetypal image of a typical kiosk in Bel-
grade, or as its idea, in Platonian sense. In the following year, on the occasion of the Belgrade Summer
Festival, Nikolić made a model of a little church (130 x 190 x 260 cm), but again as a completely closed
shape. The object was also located in the public space and perceived as the real object, although it could
not have the full function of a church.
His more recent work is Secondary Architecture (2013). Here, as in many of his newer works, Nikolić
is using found materials which were thrown away as garbage. Various pieces of wood (mainly doors)
were recycled in his art practice into a scale model of a factory, a sculpture which served as a stage,
columns which stood freely in space. After these, the Kiosk and the Church, Nikolić turned to a house,
which is the basic architectural shape. Secondary Architecture is in fact a house made of secondary
materials. During the production, Nikolić engaged Boban Mladenović, a member of Roma community
who was making houses of secondary materials for his and other families. Mladenović had learnt this
skill from his father, as a surviving strategy, and was able to contribute with his knowledge.
“House in the gallery was the final product of the process” (Nikolić, 2013) in which Nikolić and
Mladenović worked together. The process started with finding wooden pieces in garbage containers,6
followed by transporting them on Mladenović’s tricycle to the gallery and constructing the house in
situ as a happening. The whole process was documented and edited in a video which was projected on
the gallery wall in front of the finished house. The model/ prototype in this way turned into the mul-
timedia artistic and social project, a ‘right to the city’ action, which also included a public round table
discussion about favelas in Serbia.
The social problem of housing was again in the focus of Nikolić’s practice in work Superstructure
(2016) where he problematises the need for extending rooftops into new living spaces. Large propor-
tions of the work (1760 x 1150 x 240cm) are in accordance with the building standard which requires
height of minimum 240cm in flats. As such, the Superstructure is at the same time an installation and
the 1:1 model that completely occupies the gallery. Except from the reference to architectural vocabu-
lary, the title of the work is related to “Marxist theory in which social ideology and institutions are seen
as additions or a superstructure to the base which comprises the forces and relations of production and
the economy” (Erić, 2016: 6). Nikolić’s art practice emphasises disappearance of the base in this struc-
tural diagram. In former socialist Yugoslavia the housing was considered to be the basic need and right
of the workers, while after its fall, it is seen exclusively as a personal problem (Nikolić, 2015).
Yugoslav values from today’s perspective, and especially the Yugoslav and International modern-
ism, are in the focus of Marko Lulić’s art practice since 2000s. His work Lulić House No.1 (Weekend
Utopia)7 from 2005 contains references to both. The work is a wooden red house,8 which, after being
exhibited for several times, is to be transported to the Istria region of the Adriatic coast (part of former
Yugoslavia) to serve as residence of artists and architects. This process was already attempted once,
but it was postponed due to long battle with administrative regulations and restrains that arise when
someone turns an artwork into a permanent architectural object.

6 There is no systematic recycling in Serbia and citizens are not sorting their garbage. There are factories which pay for old cardboard, paper,
glass, plastic and wood, but these secondary materials are gathered directly from containers or dump sites by the poorest strata of society.
7 The work is result to Kunsthaus Bregenz’s commission of a work which is related to architecture.
8 The house was fabricated according to the artist’s specifications by the firm Oa.sys.

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Naming the work weekend utopia, Lulić makes reference to Yugoslavia where “holidays were com-
pletely institutionalised, leaving no choice neither to workers nor to enterprises. Everyone had to take
holidays” (Crvena Association for Culture and Art, 2018). These were subsidised by the country:
In 1946, the Yugoslav government decided that all workers were entitled to fourteen days annual
paid leave or up to thirty days, if engaged in heavy labour. In 1947, it was decided that union
members – which de facto meant every employee plus his or her family – would be entitled to
discounts when taking holiday: 50 percent on travel costs (excluding air travel) and 25 percent
on any accommodation booked for a minimum of five nights. (Zinganel, 2013: 162)
The system partly disappeared with the fall of Yugoslavia. The workers in public institutions in all
sectors are entitled to a month of paid leave per year, but there are no extra discounts to accommoda-
tion booking.
Apart from that, Lulić makes a reference to the International modernism, since his work is adapted
Frey House no. 1 built by architect Albert Frey in 1940-1943, at Palm Springs, California, USA. Mini-
malist Frey’s house with flat roof embodied an experimental design and principles outlined in Frey’s
book In Search of a Living Architecture (1939). It was located in such a way that it allowed the widest
view on the desert and far away to the mountains of San Jacinto. With almost invisible boundary be-
tween the interior and the exterior, the house was closely connected to the environment and it changed
together with sun, rain, wind, colours. Made of lightweight industrial materials – prefabricated wooden
structure with corrugated aluminium claddings on the outside and cement slabs on the inside – the
house was conceived as a model for future mass production. Unfortunately, it was not acknowledged
in such way, which Frey explained with the fact that people are used to the type of architecture within
which they grew up and which is closed and separated from the environment.
The house was a rectangular volume (4.9 x 6.1m) with large open part which was under long roof
that made shade from the desert sun. It contained one living room/ bedroom, while a small guest room
was behind. An important part of the house was an open terrace which was an extension of the interior,
but in larger scale. As the extension of desert colours, the interior walls were pink and the furniture was
orange. Nearby the house was a pool, while due to a climate control, it was possible to live in the house
throughout entire year. Frey acknowledged influence of the Barcelona pavilion by Mies van der Rohe,
calling the house a re-appropriation of the Mies’ pavilion into the residential house for one person.
Lulić made his re-appropriation of Frey’s re-appropriation of Mies using 2 x 2.4m wooden panes
which allow the house to be constructed in different ways. The roof pane is larger, but instead of cover-
ing more of an exterior, as in the Frey House, roof in Lulić’s design covers more of an interior, making
it larger than Frey’s and allowing more rooms. Lulić exhibits both the 1:1 model and fragments of the
house as abstract objects in the gallery space. He embraces Fray’s principle of relation between the
house and its environment both when exhibiting it in galleries (the artists’ environment) and on the
Adriatic coast.
When turning an artwork into functional architecture, and vice versa, both Lulić and Nikolić
examine where the boundary between art and architecture is.9 According to Thea Brejzek and Law-
rence Wallen, “1:1 models shift the notion of the architectural model from one of representation and
functionality to one of activation and co-authorship of space” (Brejzek and Wallen, 2014: 103), which is
particularly enabled trough contemporary art practices. The Secondary Architecture required skills of
the contemporary artist and skills which are passed from father to son in Roma community. The Lulić

9 The same question asked Jorge Pardo with his work 4166 Sea View Lane (1998) which was completely functional house, produced
as an artwork on the commission by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Instead of referring to existing prototypes as
Nikolić and Lulić, Pardo designed the house completely by himself.

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House No.1 (Weekend Utopia) is based on concept and technology developed by Albert Frey, but its des-
tiny will depend on whether administrative processes allow an artwork to be shipped to a city ground
and used as architecture. When set as functional architectural object, a residence, Lulić House No.1
(Weekend Utopia) will be the ready-made of the same artwork. But apart from that, it is poli-referential
object which is setting a piece of modern architectural history into today’s administrative regulations.

DOPPELGANGER MODELS AS SYMBOLS OF A COUNTRY

Using cement, metal, plasterboard and wood, Saša Tkačenko created an exact 1:1 replica of a small
auxiliary object of the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities in New
Belgrade. The project of the Museum had begun with foundation of the institution in 195910 by the
decision of Yugoslav Central Committee and it was planned to be opened in 1981, on the occasion of
celebrating 40 years of antifascist struggle of the Yugoslav people. In the meantime, numerous plans re-
garding the location of the Museum had been changed and by 1980 the works had completely stopped,
leaving the foundations, the underground levels and the building replicated by Tkačenko. By 1996,
after the break of Yugoslavia and drastic inflation in Serbia, the idea of the Museum of the Revolution
of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minorities had been completely abandoned. The only building that is
above the ground level within the area of the Museum is the object which Tkačenko replicated and ti-
tled Pavilion (2015). Glass from the panes is long gone, if it were finished in the first place, and only the
concrete shell remains. With dimensions 460 x 660 x 300cm, it is drastically smaller than the grandiose
Museum building which would have 5,000 square metres in the base, as much as the nearby Federal
Executive Council, nowadays the Palace of Serbia.11
The author duplicated today’s appearance of the object and placed it in the Belgrade City Museum,12
a location that changed its functions over time, serving as military academy and a printing house.
Drawing attention to changed symbolic and cultural values of objects within different political, eco-
nomic and social contexts, Tkačenko shows how “fragile status of social ideas is put into question and
the inability of their accumulation is being provoked in the space of the object” (Tkačenko, 2017). The
Pavilion exhibits the history and destiny of the Museum and is at the same time unable to present all
those things and ideas the Museum should have had presented. Together with the foundations, it is a
remainder of the empty space for that museum. It is mirrored, duplicated object which is the form of
conscious critique. While analysing the dialectics of consciousness, ego and mirror, Lacan notes that
an imaginary space in the mirror within which we locate the realistic object, is “a phenomenon of con-
sciousness as such” (Lacan, 1988a: 46), since “the real object isn’t the object that you see in the mirror”
(Lacan, 1988a: 46). Tkačenko’s Pavilion is not the object beside the foundations of inexistent Museum,
it is a reflection which points out how hard it is to maintain and build the grand idea of Yugoslavism,
as well as how it turns to a kiosk-size when the system starts to fall apart. His work also points out how
memory of Yugoslavia is still rooted in collective memory, as well as numerous projects that are left
unfinished with the break of the state.
Tkačenko expressed his interest in pavilions and Yugoslav heritage in several more recent works
– Eternal Flame (2018), Sketch for Utopia (2018) and Melancholy, Proposal for a Monument (2018). The

10 The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade was founded in 1958.

11 The Museum would have been surrounded with the first buildings in New Belgrade, the city which was conceived by the end of 1946
as the new Yugoslav capital. These buildings were finished in the 1960s and they include the Federal Executive Council, the Building of
Social and Political Organisations (Central Committee building) which is the New Belgrade’s first skyscraper, hotel and the Museum of
Contemporary Art. The miniature object which Tkačenko replicates is standing there among these buildings, instead of the Museum
of Revolution.
12 Within the exhibition Tracks and Traces (16 May – 6 June 2015) curated by Katharina Schendl.

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latter is 1:1 reconstruction in plaster of the fontal segment of Serbian pavilion in Venice, which used to
be the pavilion of Yugoslavia. In this work, Tkačenko takes a step further from dislocating the replica,
as in case of the Pavilion. Since the name of the former country is still present in the relief of the façade,
he juxtaposed it with textual neon intervention which reads Melancholy, relating thus the topos of the
real, now imagined and symbolic country, to the topological space within language. He chose precisely
the part of the façade which contains word “Yugoslavia” to replicate it, to move it from Italy to former
Yugoslavia in process of dislocating the sign from one symbolic system to another, and to add the new
word. By introducing the semantic level in form of the other word, Tkačenko conceals “the main word
through the agency of ruins, utopia and future” (Paunić, 2018).
The fragment of the full-scale model was located as an installation inside of a gallery “as a response
to the impossibility of installing the work on the original façade in the Giardini” (Tkačenko , 2018). The
fragment, according to Maurice Blanchot, “tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes” (1995:
60) and this dissolution can be related both to (memory of) Yugoslavia and to the current constellation
of pavilions at the Venice biennale which still contains name “Yugoslavia” within it. By ascribing frag-
mentary appearance to the full-scale model of the pavilion, Tkačenko draws parallel to an unfinished
project for the Museum of the Revolution, establishing a direct relationship between the pavilion in
Venice, which is the internationally most representative place of the country, and his Pavilion, which
emphasises the fallacy of social representation within one architectural object. Through combination
of images, text and architecture, Tkačenko is, according to Đorđe Miketić, “finding balance between
signs and objects, intimate and collective memory, uniqueness and serial production, past and future,
decadent and revolutionary, possible and impossible” (2018).
In the same way a fragmented, dislocated façade containing name “Yugoslavia” is a symptom of
one former country, its place in collective memory and its international representation, so is a card-
board replica of automobile model Yugo. Vladimir Bojić in his work Yugo (2007) turned to this model
which was developed by Yugoslav factory Zastava in 1970s and widely used, being one of the cheapest,
smallest and most convenient models for the city. It was “the fastest-selling European product of all
time in the first year of sales in the USA” (Vuic, 2010: 6). Aesthetically, it looked similar to Fiat’s model
147 from 1976, which the Italian factory was producing in Brazil.
Bojić created a cut-and-fold cardboard model of the car13 and subsequently placed it in several cit-
ies, usually in zones where parking is not allowed. The project included development of technical design
of the cardboard model, its production and the action of manual relocation of the model through cities.
All segments were documented, as well as reactions of drivers and pedestrians when realising that an
immovable Yugo is made of cardboard. Using a simulation of an industrial product, Bojić based the
project “on the idea of opposing the social reality by simulation of the car” (Bojić, 2007: 25). With an ac-
tion in public space, he located the model into Yugo’s natural environment, reversing its function from
a means of transportation to the object which needs to be carried around on foot by four people, as a
coffin. This degradation, as well as degradation in material, is symbolic at several levels.
Yugo was mass produced and affordable model which remained with families long after the break
of Yugoslavia, war and sanctions to Serbia which followed it. As such, it degraded and kept breaking by

13 Being a cardboard replica of Yugo, instead of a ready-made object, Bojić’s work differs from those made by students of Kevin
O’Callaghan, an artist, a teacher and a set designer for films, television and theatre. For the assigned spring term exhibition Yugo Next in
1995, 29 O’Callaghan’s students from the New York’s School of Visual Arts turned cast-off vehicles into a confessional, a movie theatre,
a fireplace, a foosball table, a cigarette lighter, a post office box, the Moai monument, a telephone, a grocery store ride, an accordion, a
shooting range, a shower, a slot machine, a submarine, a subway car, a toaster, a concert piano, a police car, a junkyard, a photo booth, a
barbeque, a moving toilet... The exhibition and works within it gave new purpose to the car model which could not be used any longer,
because Yugoslavia, the country which used to produce reserve parts, does not exist any longer. For images, see Tom Magliery’s album
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/sets/72157630309734414/>.

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time, almost never being able to start an engine with the first turn of the key. It also remained related in
collective memory to petrol shortage when people would wait in lines in front of gas stations for days.
Yugo is described by many users as the worst car ever made, yet people in former Yugoslavia could not
afford any other for a very long time. Having a symbolic name, it is also representation of decline of
Yugoslavia and its industrial production on the global market, since it was the only Yugoslav car sold in
the USA. According to Slavko Timotijević,
Bojić’s project analyses, interprets and artistically articulates the syndrome of political ambition,
which simply pushed technologically, economically and socio-politically unprepared society for
precise and serious industrial production, into a rigorous global competition without any realis-
tic preconditions for achieving its goal. (2007: 5)
Although Bojić does not turn to architecture, his immovable and static urban object is not a simply
mimesis of a car. He deliberately chose the Yugo model (although Zastava also produced other models)
so that the object and the name are embodying the idea of socialist Yugoslavia and its non-alignment.
The act of carrying it on hands is reference to working brigades that built the first buildings in New
Belgrade and that would build the Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Nations and Ethnic Minori-
ties. However, instead of the affordable, convenient product offered to the global market, Yugo became
an obstacle in traffic and in progress. Both Bojić and Tkačenko reflect on drastic difference between the
started progress and the subsequent fall.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Full-scale models of buildings within contemporary art practices are rarely exact copies, but even
if so, the act of duplication and dislocation into a new context gives new meanings and values to the
object, as in Saša Tkačenko’s Pavilion. Even in this work, the model is not representative of the object
it copies, but of the never built ideological building whose proportions were supposed to be so large,
that they are beyond comparison to the small Pavilion. Architectural models within contemporary
artworks are neither ready-made objects since each of the artists had built them from nothing. They are
also not simple appropriations, since each artist added some new aspect to the objects, emphasizing the
relation of models to their other (the real architecture) and the contexts which surround them. In each
of the studied cases, there is a complex critical relation towards the past and current social reality. Apart
from direct quoting of architectural forms which are the best representatives of those changed social
realities, each work contains a degree of innovation which is a critical instrument. For that reason, these
models require an emancipated viewer who is aware of the changed political and social contexts of both
the buildings in their original appearances and locations, and of their ‘copies’ in form of models within
contemporary artistic practices.
When it comes to primary use of full-scale models, their role in architecture is temporary, specific
and related to development of ideas. They rarely exist in spatial discourse beyond that point, except
perhaps in museums of architecture. Once the models are seen by investors and explained by architects,
they are torn down, regardless of whether the project turns into a real building or not. In case of once
existing architecture, full-scale models present buildings that cannot be experienced any longer. In case
of existing architecture in other places, full-scale models make them approachable at several places at
once. Within contemporary art practices, models gain both different spatial and cultural contexts, as
well as new temporal appearance that has nothing to do with the architectural process itself. They be-
come referential objects that represent all those ideas that architecture represents, and far more.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, London: The Athlone Press, 1997 (original published in 1970)
Association Apsolutno (Zoran Pantelić, Dragan Rakić, Bojana Petrić, Dragan Miletić), The Absolute Report, Frankfurt
am Main: Revolver, Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2006
Blanchot, Maurice, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995
Bojić, Vladimir, Yugo, artist statement, Zemun: G.L.O.R.I.J.A, 2007
Brejzek, Thea and Wallen, Lawrence, “The 1:1 Architectural Model as Performance and Double,” in: Wayan Jatasya Adri-
anie, Noor Fajrina F. Istiani, Arif Rahman Wahid (eds.), [in]arch international conference proceedings, 10-11 Sep-
tember 2014, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, 2014, 95-103
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, London, New York: Routledge, 2002
Erić, Zoran, “On the Exhibition Title”, in: Branislav Nikolić, Superstructure, Belgrade: Salon Muzeja savremene umet-
nosti, 2016, 5-12
Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press, 1999
Koolhass, Rem, “The House That Made Mies”, in OMA, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL, The Monacelli Press,
1995, 62-63
Lacan, Jacques, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” in: Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Semi-
nar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, London:
Cambridge University Press, 1988 (original published in 1973), 40-52
Lacan, Jacques, “The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis,” in: Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Cambridge University Press, 1988 (original
published in 1973), 216-229
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Oxford, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991 (original published in 1974)
Timotijević, Slavko, “Art Against Simulacrum, or Exorcism of Ghosts to Open Space of Realistic Reading of Reality”, in:
Vladimir Bojić, Yugo, Zemun: G.L.O.R.I.J.A, 2007, 4-7
Vuic, Jason, The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, New York: Hill and Wang, 2010
Zinganel, Michael, “From ‘Social Tourism’ to a Mass Market Consumer Paradise. On the Democratization and Com-
modification of Seaside Tourism in Croatia,” in: Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann and Michael Zinganel (eds.) Holidays
after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia, Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2013, 155-170

ONLINE SOURCES:

Fujiwara, Simon, “Why Artist Simon Fujiwara Rebuilt Anne Frank’s House Inside an Israeli Gallery,” interviewed by Hili
Perlson, September 11, 2017, online magazine Artnet, last accessed July 28, 2018, <https://news.artnet.com/exhibi-
tions/simon-fujiwara-anner-frank-house-israel-1075127>.
Miketić, Đorđe, “Kakvoća nostalgije,” March 7, 2018, online magazine Supervizuelna, last accessed July 28, 2018, <http://
www.supervizuelna.com/kakvoca-nostalgije/>.
Nikolić, Branislav, “Krov i fabrika,” artist statement, November 4, 2015, online magazine Supervizuelna, last accessed
July 28, 2018, <http://www.supervizuelna.com/branislav-nikolic-krov-i-fabrika/>.
Nikolić, Branislav, “Sekundarna arhitektura,” interviewed by Žolt Kovač, December 24, 2013, online magazine Super-
vizuelna, last accessed July 28, 2018, <http://www.supervizuelna.com/razgovori-branislav-nikolic-sekundarna-
arhitektura/>.
Paunić, Natalija, “Saša Tkačenko – Ruins of Future Utopia,” February 23, 2018, last accessed July 28, 2018, <http://eug-
ster-belgrade.com/static/uploads/files/Sasa_Tkacenko_-_Ruins_of_Future_Utopia_-_exhibition_text.pdf>.
Tkačenko, Saša, “Melancholy, Proposal for a Monument,” artist statement, last accessed July 28, 2018, < http://sasatka-
cenko.com/portfolio/melancholy-proposal-for-a-monument/>.
Tkačenko, Saša, “Pavilion”, artist statement, July 4, 2017, last accessed July 28, 2018, <http://sasatkacenko.com/2017/07/04/
pavilion/>.

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OTHER:

Crvena Association for Culture and Art (Sarajevo), excerpt from “We Have Built Cities for You: An Exhibition on the Con-
tradictions of Yugoslav Socialism”, curated by Vida Knežević and Marko Miletić (Kontekst kolektiv), 13. 6 - 2. 7. 2018,
Pavilion Cvijeta Zuzorić, Belgrade

Arhitektonski modeli razmere 1:1 u

post-jugoslovenskim umetničkim praksama

SAŽETAK: Rad se fokusira na odabrane radove savremenih umetnika koji sadrže u sebi arhitek-
tonske modele u razmeri 1:1, to jest u realnoj veličini. Ti radovi su Kiosk (2002), Crkva (2003),
Sekundarna arhitektura (2013) i Superstruktura (2016) Branislava Nikolića, potom Lulić kuća br.1
(vikend utopija) Marka Lulića (2005), dva rada Saše Tkačenka – Paviljon (2015) i Melanholija, predlog
za spomenik (2018), kao i rad Yugo (2007) Vladimira Bojića koji ne sadrži arhitektonski model, nego
nepomični model automobila u razmeri 1:1 i kao takav urbani element postiže isti efekat. Rad ima
dvostruk cilj – da analizira ove umetničke radove i da osvetli poziciju 1:1 modela u savremenim
umetničkim praksama. Modeli u realnoj veličini se pojavljuju kao kopije zgrada, njihove replike,
dvojnici, simulacije, redi-mejd objekti, skulpture, instalacije, aproprijacije i produkti događaja.
Kako bi se stekao širi uvid u odnos savremene umetnosti prema 1:1 arhitektonskim modelima,
rad uključuje i analizu dva rada britanskih umetnika Rejčel Vajtrid (Rachel Whiteread) i Sajmona
Fudživare (Simon Fujiwara) koji odabiraju isti koncpet u svojim radovima Kuća (1993) i Kuća nade
(2017). Teorijski deo uključuje trijalektiku prostora Anrija Lefevra (Henri Lefebvre), teoriju umet-
nosti i mimezisa Teodora Adorna (Theodor Adorno), psihoanalitičku teoriju ogledala Žaka Lakana
(Jacques Lacan), kao i zapažanja Rema Kolhasa (Rem Koolhaas), Tee Brejzek (Thea Brejzek) i Lo-
rensa Valena (Lawrence Wallen) o 1:1 arhitektonskim modelima. Rad zaključuje da svaki umetnik
svojim radom postavlja kritiku određene društvene stvarnosti i da je za svakog od njih od izuzetne
važnosti koje konkretne arhitektonske objekte izrađuju u formi 1:1 modela i uključuju u svoje
prakse.
KLJUČNE REČI: modeli u realnoj veličini, arhitektura, savremene umetničke prakse, post-ju-
goslovensko

Primljeno: 27. septembar 2018.

Prihvaćeno za objavljivanje: 12. oktobar 2018.

jankovsonja@gmail.com

66
Visual attachment
(unedited)

Rachel Whiteread, House, London, 1993-1994, photo by John Davies, 1994

Simon Fujiwara, Hope House, 2018, exhibition view of the third floor,
Kunsthaus Bregenz, photo by Markus Tretter
Branislav Nikolić, Secondary Architecture, 2013, Gallery Magacin, photo by Nebojša Vasić

Branislav Nikolić, Superstructure, 2016, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art,

photo by Nebojša Vasić
Marko Lulić, Lulić House No.1 (Weekend Utopia), 2005, Kunsthaus Bregenz,
photo by Markus Tretter

Albert Frey, Frey House no. 1, 1940-1943, Palm Springs, California, USA
 Saša Tkačenko, Pavilion, 2015, Belgrade City Museum, photo by Ivan Zupanc

Saša Tkačenko, Melancholy, Proposal for a Monument, 2018, Gallery Eugster, Belgrade,
photo by Ivan Zupanc
Vladimir Bojić, Yugo, 2007, various cities in Serbia, photo by the author